It was reasonable in the past to use ASCII encoding by default, but this is not the case now. And the manual says: "YAML streams are encoded using the set of printable Unicode characters, either in UTF-8 or UTF-16.". So I think it's just a limitation in Ruby's library, to_yaml should return UTF-8 by default. Otherwise it's really burdensome to modify those YAML with an editor.
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toklandMar 11 '11 at 13:31